The effects of a 1983 Nuclear War on Southern Africa

SA was actually a target of propaganda war waged by Ussr in 1983. There were a lot of fake letters, redacted by KGB, which tried to demonstrate and denounce links between SA and Western Powers, in order to discredit the Western leaderships (http://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0922/092239.html/(page)/2). In case of a general war, Ussr would probably have tried to intervene in African wars, against SA. In case of protracted conflict, this could have been a useful propaganda tool ("We, the Socialist countries, are against the Evil Apartheid Regime"). In case of thermonuclear global war the destruction of SA could be less useful. But... I don't know if there was a Soviet African Strategy in case of nuclear war. But in the 40s and 50s there was, for exemple, a France African Strategy in case of nuclear war: if France is destroyed by a nuclear weapons, French people and army could regroup and reorganize in African colonies. Maybe the Soviets could have thought the same thing when they tried to create new friendly regimes and bases in Sub-Saharan Africa: a safe haven, useful for a post-war reconstruction. Destroying a South African enemy could make sense in this scenario, also in case of thermonuclear global war.
 
NZ may have been safe thanks to Lange, though I am not sure if the USSR saw it the same way. Australia very likely was a target (US bases, pro-NATO and mineral resources supplier to the West), and South Africa was in much the same boat (though basing was potential only) plus was located in a more strategically sensitive position and bordered active Soviet allies. I think they were in line for a number of nukes.

Maybe there are reliable targeting lists available but I don't know where they would be.

I strongly suspect the USSR didn't have just one target list. We certainly didn't. As far as I'm aware the actual lists from after about 1960 have never been declassified, but we have documents discussing the various war plans, and the SIOP was designed as a menu of options to be selected from based on the circumstance. I'd assume the USSR would have something similar - multiple war plans depending on the circumstances.

That said, if any non-belligerent countries were going to be hit, I'd expect South Africa to be close to the top of the list. Maybe not hit very hard - the Soviets have a lot of targets to strike - but probably at least a few major cities, and their nuclear program if the Soviets know about it and can find it.
 
I thought the main AH nuclear war that everybody keeps writing about was February 1984.

Is this a new nuclear war scenario?
 
I thought the main AH nuclear war that everybody keeps writing about was February 1984.

Is this a new nuclear war scenario?

September 26 1983 is the day Stanislov Petrov allegedly saved the world. Petrov was an officer in the Soviet military manning a command post for the air defense forces when early warning satellites detected a cluster of incoming missiles. His task was to report this up the chain of command, the common inference being that the Soviets would have then launched a retaliatory nuclear strike. However, the system was new and Petrov decided this was probably just a bug, which, in fact, it turned out to be.

I'm a little skeptical of this story, because it assumes the Soviet Union was on a launch-on-warning alert status at the time, and that they would launch based on a single warning of a handful of missiles. Both of which seem unlikely to me, but cannot be ruled out, especially given the paranoia of the 1983 Soviet leadership about American intentions.
 
I thought the main AH nuclear war that everybody keeps writing about was February 1984.

Is this a new nuclear war scenario?

in 1983 the world escape two times a full scale nuclear war

Case one
NATO exercises Abel Archer 83
this was one of the biggest exercises by NATO
so big that USSR military believed it's the begin of a full-scale Invasion of East block...

Case two
A cross-referencing malfunction in Soviet Defense computer OKO, gave a false alert of one single ICBM Nuclear Attack on USSR.
the only one standing between total destruction and today, was lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov,
who was very skeptical toward the OKO system, who mistook a Molniya satellite as US ICBM...
 
Top